Convert SQLite3 to psql
Upload a .sqlite or .db or .sqlite3 file and get back a psql SQL script you can load straight into your database. Types are preserved rather than flattened to text. Free, no registration, up to 10MB.
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CSV, Excel, SQLite, SQL, DBF (max 10 MB)
How your data is typed in psql
Generated from the converter's own psql type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.
| Your data | psql type |
|---|---|
| Whole number | BIGINT |
| Decimal (money) | NUMERIC(10,2) |
| Floating point | DOUBLE PRECISION |
| True / false | BOOLEAN |
| Date | DATE |
| Date and time | TIMESTAMP |
| Short text | TEXT |
| Long text | TEXT |
| Binary data | BYTEA |
Working from a .sqlite3 file
The 3 in .sqlite3 is the version of the file format, not of your file, and it has not changed since 2004. A .sqlite3 and a .sqlite are the same kind of thing under two naming habits, and both are read the same way.
- →db.sqlite3 is Django's default database name, and a Django database converts whole: django_migrations, auth_user and django_session are ordinary tables here and come across with everything else.
- →Nothing is filtered on the way through, so if you only want the application tables it is easier to drop the framework ones in the target database after loading.
- →The extension does not change how the file is read - it only has to be one the uploader recognises, and .sqlite, .sqlite3 and .db all are.
Running the script through psql
psql is PostgreSQL's command-line client rather than the database itself, and the script is written to be fed straight into it. Everything here is about the tool you run, not about the server you run it against.
- →From inside a session already open, \i dump.sql runs the file without leaving the prompt. The script contains no backslash meta-commands of its own, so nothing in it can collide with yours.
- →There is no BEGIN and no COMMIT anywhere in the file. Statements commit as they go, so a failure halfway leaves the tables already created: pass -1 to wrap the whole load in a single transaction, or -v ON_ERROR_STOP=1 to stop at the first error instead of carrying on past it.
- →The script switches standard_conforming_strings on itself instead of trusting the server default, so it behaves identically against a session that has been moved off it.
- →It sets client_encoding to UTF8 for the same reason. The file is written as UTF-8 with nothing to announce that, and psql would otherwise decode it using whatever the client locale says.
Reading SQLite3
- →Declared types, primary keys, NOT NULL constraints and blobs all carry through.
- →SQLite reports INTEGER PRIMARY KEY as nullable because it aliases the rowid; the conversion corrects that.
- →SQLite type affinity is loose, so a NUMERIC column with no declared scale is given room for decimals rather than being rounded to whole numbers.
Writing psql
- →Backslashes are left alone, because PostgreSQL treats them as ordinary characters — doubling them would corrupt every Windows path.
- →Auto-increment columns become GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY.
- →Binary data is written as bytea, and identifiers respect the 63-character limit.
What you get
A ZIP containing dump.sql, plus a README with the exact command to load it. If anything about your data needed a judgement call, a _warnings.txt explains it.
Load this dump into PostgreSQL: psql -U USER -d DATABASE -f dump.sql Create the database first if it does not exist: createdb -U USER DATABASE
Questions
- Is converting SQLite3 to psql free?
- Yes. Files up to 10MB convert free with no account. There is a limit of five conversions per day per IP address.
- Will my SQLite3 data keep its types in psql?
- Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real psql types rather than everything becoming text. The mapping table above shows exactly what you get.
- Do you store my file?
- No. The file is written to a temporary directory, converted, and the directory is deleted as soon as your download has been sent.